Contributed Photo
Trenton native and Army Counter-intelligence agent Ernie Virok (left) prepares to question an unidentified Huk guerilla in connection with the search for General Wainwrightís sword in December of 1946 in the Philippines.

Long before he was the owner of the landmark Homestead Restaurant in Hamilton, Virok played in a historic football game just before making some history of his own.

When Virok got his first military draft notice in October 1945, he was about to play in the biggest football game of his life when the two top-ranked teams in the nation, Notre Dame and Army, faced off in a packed Yankee Stadium.

That same autumn, General Jonathan Wainright was regaining his swagger after surrendering the Philippines to the Japanese in early 1942 and spending over three years as the highest-ranking American prisoner in just-ended World War II.

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And native Filipino Lorenzo “Poppy” Alvarado, a wily U.S. Army master sergeant, former spy and decorated combat veteran, was setting up a counter-intelligence unit to ferret out enemy collaborators and monitor a well-armed, guerilla group known in the hillside villages outside Manila as the Hukbalahap, or Huks.

The lives of Virok, Alvarado and Wainwright converged because the General had lost his prized possession — a cavalry saber given to him by his mother when he graduated from West Point in 1906 — during the Japanese bombardment of Manila.

But as a scholarship freshman center and linebacker at Notre Dame, Virok said as he turned 18 that October, his thoughts about the military were focused on how to stop Army’s two consensus All-Americans, fullback Doc Blanchard and halfback Glenn Davis.

But gameday — Nov. 10, 1945 — did not go well for the Fighting Irish.

“We got clobbered,” said Virok of Army’s 48-0 drubbing of Notre Dame. He said he recalled tackling both Blanchard and Davis, but added, “We didn’t tackle them much.”

Recruited by Notre Dame Coach Hugh Devore out of Trenton Catholic High School where he won all-state parochial school honors, Virok said he was a third-string freshman who only saw about 12 minutes of actual game action against Army, playing both offense and defense.

“But I did find time to make a bad snap from center,” said Virok, now 85 and living in Burlington County.

Fate then prevented Virok from paying back West Point the next year on the football field because the Army, despite the war’s end, plucked him from the Notre Dame campus in South Bend, Ind., sent him to basic training at Fort Knox, Ky. That put him on a troop ship initially bound for Europe, but then re-directed to the Philippines via the Panama Canal by the summer of 1946.

Virok, trained as a cavalryman, was soon assigned to the counter-intelligence unit of the 1135th CIC Detachment where the diminutive Sgt. Alvarado apparently saw the benefit of having a college linebacker drive his jeep while the two patrolled guerilla-rich villages outside Manila as post-war rebellion fomented against the new, U.S. backed-Philippine government.

But Virok denied he was an enforcer and suggested he was selected by Alvarado to help conduct sensitive interrogations because of his college credits.

“Poppy (Alvarado) liked that I had some college,” said Virok. “He was big on education.”

Then, in mid-November of 1946, Alvarado and Virok got orders from their commanding officer, Lt. Col. Ronald Hobbs, in the counter-intelligence unit. General Wainwright, by then commanding the Fourth Army out of Fort Sam Houston, Tex., had received a tip that his treasured sword had been taken from the body of a dead Japanese general and was circulating in the murky Philippine underground. The two were told to “look for the saber,” according to Alvarado’s military deposition on file at West Point.

“Poppy knew everybody — good and bad,” Virok said of Alvarado, whose pre-war spying included working undercover for gun smugglers who hid rifles under corpses in coffins transported from Japan to the Philippines.

Over the next couple of weeks, tips from locals in the barrio of Pampanga led the pair to a Huk leader who allegedly had secured Wainwright’s sword from a Philippine businessman who gave it up after fearing for his life, Alvarado testified.

The guerilla leader was arrested, but remained tight-lipped during three days of questioning by the Philippine Military Police until Alvarado said he intervened in “a diplomatic way.”

The style of diplomacy was not detailed in the official military account, but the Huk leader was soon released from custody and the master sergeant and the Notre Dame footballer-turned-Army-private returned to their headquarters with General Wainwright’s sword.

“Poppy could be very persuasive,” said Virok while sitting at a table in the kitchen of the Homestead Inn. He then pulled out a letter dated Jan. 16, 1947 and addressed to him from General Wainwright which reads in part, “Major General George F. Moore, Commanding in the Philippines, advises me that you were one of the agents that conducted the investigation in connection with the return of my saber that is now in my possession…. My mother gave this saber to me and I cannot express my gratitude to you for the part you took in returning it to me.”

Les Jensen, curator for arms and armor at the West Point Museum, said Wainwright’s sword has been on display there since shortly after the Medal of Honor winner’s family donated it to the Military Academy following the General’s death in 1953.

Records show Alvarado died in 1974 and was honored posthumously by admittance to the Military Counter-Intelligence Hall of Fame.

After his Army discharge in 1947, Virok opted to follow Coach Devore who had taken the head coaching job at St. Bonaventure University in Olean, N.Y. Virok played three more years of varsity football for the Bonnies before graduating with a business degree in 1951.

Virok said he took a job for a year as line coach at St. Cecilia’s High School in Englewood where he got close to the family of Fordham University and National Football League icon Vince Lombardi who began his coaching career there. He then served as head football coach for four years at Trenton Catholic.

“Ernie Virok was a great football coach,” said Joe Flynn, a retired New Jersey State Police colonel who graduated from Trenton Catholic in 1956 as an all-state parochial school linebacker. “But he never told us about the General’s sword — he was always a very humble guy.”